A forgettable film, full of problems, and which purges Garfield of the charisma and soul of the original cartoon character.
I have to say that, although I'm not a comic book fan, I've loved Garfield since I was a child, particularly due to his adaptation into children's cartoons, which I saw in my childhood and loved. I also saw the more modern animations, in digital format, but I can't help but think that the classic material is better, and the stories presented are much more engaging. In any case, trying to compare the 2004 film to any of the Garfield animations or comic books is a real trial by fire: the film is considerably weaker, even though it has certain positive points that deserve our attention.
The film was directed by a certain Joel Cohen, who is not the same Joel from the Cohen Brothers, he is another person with an identical name, who I didn't know. The director doesn't seem to me to have been the best student in the directing class at film school... notice how the film was poorly edited and unfolds unevenly, wasting a lot of time on uninteresting things just to rush near the end. In addition to the pacing problems, the film lacks a good soundtrack and some comic “spark” that gives it soul and charm. Although sarcasm works effectively and is a very solid characteristic of the character, Garfield manages to be funnier and more charismatic than this cat in this film, and most of the jokes sound hollow, especially to adults.
The script, instead of taking advantage of the wealth of Garfield that exists in comics and animations, serves us a story that is dull, uninteresting, poorly written and full of clichés. It seems that the production only had people who didn't like, or didn't know, the character: the film only talks about the friendship between Garfield and Oddie, a cat and a dog who will have to learn to share the attention of their owner, Jon. There is an attempt to do anything more than that by inserting a villain who acts like Cruella De Vil, trying to use animals for his selfish purposes. In the end, he looks like Mufasa in the hands of the hyenas in “Lion King”: the scenes are identical, a copy that shows the void of ideas in that production room.
However, despite all these problems being worthy of consideration, the film has quality elements, starting with the CGI and digital animation, which were inserted into the conventional filming with great technical skill. Even for the beginning of the century, it's a reasonably convincing film, with one drawback: Garfield's character. Being a “live action” film where all the characters, human or not, are real and similar to their animated counterparts, why didn’t they do the same with the orange cat? The cat remains equal to the animated one, and is the only one, brutally clashing with everything! For a practical example, compare Garfield to Oddie or even Nermal: the two characters look much better than the animated cat.
As for the actors, the film seems to have made safe bets on competent people who could add some talent to the film and guarantee a minimum of quality: Jennifer Love Hewitt does a very competent job, but it is a film that she cannot save, she is in a position too secondary to do it; Bill Murray, despite only lending his voice to the cat, is the ideal actor to do it. Not only does he have the most suitable tone and voice, he also has an extraordinary comedic streak and ability to make jokes loaded with sarcasm. However, even he knows this film is weak, despite the cash he received for lending his voice! Stephen Tobolowsky is a weak, pantomime villain, with no personality or ability to threaten, and Brekin Meyer doesn't give Jon a personality worthy of our esteem, he turns him into a sympathetic fool.
